Ok, I need to give you all a little more info because I don't think the FIREWALL has anything to do with the INCONSISTENT STARTUP PROBLEM. In fact, two weeks ago I was using ZONE ALARM and I would temporarily disable the FIREWALL before starting up FC and the same thing would happen. I can't pin down what combination of things I do to make FC startup, but this is usually what I do once FC fails to start:
(0) REBOOT
(1) Run the saved registry to reinstate the saved registry (Does it matter what directory I run this from?)
(2) Temporarily disable the FIREWALL.
(3) Try to startup FC
(4) If FC fails it will not let me shutdown the FC program or close Windows. I must turn the computer off (by the way, it's a DELL 8400 3.2 gig and the game runs great on it when it does run)
(5) Sometimes I can try steps 1 thru 5 and FC will startup, if not, I will run the remove SF program and start the process over again until it does work.
I have reloaded all programs, Lockon thru FC.12, from scratch three times now and that didn't seem to help either.
That's it. Any more ideas?
Thanks for the help guys.